A Case Study of Mentors and Mentees’ Professional Development in the Practicum

Date

2017-08-22

Author

Balıkçı, Gözde
Gümüşok, Fatma
Bal Gezegin, Betül

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This case study aims to explore the professional development experiences of two fourth–year student teachers (mentees) and their two cooperative school teachers (mentors) in the practicum component of English language teacher education program in a state university. The participants of this study have been doing their internship in their last year of pre- service education. They have been working with each other for a year which is a long time to explore the relationship between the mentors and the mentees. The inclusion of mentoring as a formal part of the teacher education programs dates back to 1980s (Hobson et al., 2009) and since then a considerable body of research has been conducted to investigate the practice of mentoring and mentored learning to obtain information on its nature, advantages, disadvantages, failures, roles of parties etc. (McIntyre, Hagger, &Wilkin, 1994). In order to better understand the mentoring experience, the roles of the parties should be clear. Tomlinson (1995) states that mentor teachers have two major roles; (1) the coach, challenging and stimulating students’ motivation and commitment, (2) the facilitator, supporting teaching skills, including counseling. Mentee, on the other hand, is seen as a student who is expected to demonstrate what he has learnt by cooperatively working with his mentor in a reflective, supportive and constructivist atmosphere. Recent studies on mentorship from schools in Turkey seem to reach conclusions that the significance of mentorship in teacher education programs should be underscored and mentorship has common problems and failures as well as benefits and gains. Ekiz (2006), in his study on mentorship, for example, concluded that communication between mentor and mentee in the mentoring experience is of upmost importance. Isıkoglu, Ivrendi, and Sahin (2007) reported similar findings in their study that pre-service teachers had trouble in building professional and fruitful relationships with their mentors. Such findings are not limited to mentor teachers; dissatisfaction of pre-service teachers with their supervisors at their universities has been reported in many recent studies

URI

http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/pdf/print/conference/22/contribution/40214/
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/71781
https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/conference/22/contribution/40214/

Conference Name

Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)(22 - 23 August 2017 )

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

G. Balıkçı, F. Gümüşok, and B. Bal Gezegin, “A Case Study of Mentors and Mentees’ Professional Development in the Practicum,” presented at the Emerging Researchers’ Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers’ Conference)(22 - 23 August 2017 ), Copenhagen, Danimarka, 2017, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/pdf/print/conference/22/contribution/40214/.